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Today, human genetics is for everyone. It is about variation more than about illnesses, and increasingly about the common rather than about the rare. Once an obscure science or an occasional explanation for an odd collection of symptoms, human genetics is now part of everyday conversation. By coming to know genetic backgrounds, people can control their environments in more healthy ways. Genetic knowledge is, therefore, both informative and empowering. This edition of Human Genetics: Concepts and Applications shows students how and why that is true.

For more than a century, we have relied on chemical cures to keep our bodies free from disease and our farms free from bugs and weeds. We rarely consider human and agricultural health together, but both are based on the same ecology, and both are being threatened by organisms that have evolved to resist our antibiotics and pesticides. Patients suffer from C.diff, a painful, potentially lethal gut infection associated with multiple rounds of antibiotics; orange groves rot from insect-borne bacteria; and the blight responsible for the Irish potato famine outmaneuvers fungicides. Our chemicals are failing us.

From two of the world’s top scientists and one of the world’s top science writers (all parents), Dirt Is Good is a Q&A-based guide to everything you need to know about kids and germs.

You feel ecstatic! Until you kill yourself. The Happy Chip is the latest nanoengineering wonder from the high-flying tech company, NeoHappy, Inc.